Fractured Destinies

by Rabai al-Madhoun

  4

  Haifa

  “Do you like Haifa?” Umm Jamil, Jamil’s mother, asked me. “They say that any Palestinian who visits Haifa loses his mind and comes away mad.” The expression on her face as she said it was one of anticipation.

  Jamil’s car took us up Mount Carmel from al-Jabal Street (which had become Zionut Avenue), and on to Wadi al-Nisnas, where the House of the Vine (Beit Hagefen) cultural center was situated, which still smelled of Emil Habibi and the al-Ittihad newspaper that we loved.

  I remembered The Remainer in Jinin’s novel, and his ‘comradely’ arguments in the offices of the Communist Party (Rakah) newspaper. I also remembered how Emil Habibi had abandoned his atheism and had asked God’s forgiveness for that late morning when The Remainer had come into his office, and for every morning or evening that the two comrades had met before or would meet in the future. Now we were crossing al-Khury Street, where Haifa’s rich lived, and passing in front of the Protestant school and church, as Jamil explained to us. Heavens, so this was Wadi al-Nisnas! An orange notice directed us to it. The quarter had lurked there since 1948, like a lion guarding what we still had in Haifa. It had remained Palestinian, even when Hezbollah’s rockets had fallen on it in the 2006 war, destroying some offices of the al-Ittihad newspaper and killing two Palestinians near the school. The quarter was happy—overjoyed, even—at the death that had descended on it. Some residents congratulated each other and said, “We’ve been visited by Arab missiles—hello and welcome to our Lebanese guests!”

  The car took us up to al-Isfahani Hill, borne on the shoulders of the Najla falafel restaurant. There, past the restaurant, under that tree in the corner to the left, the poet Ahmad Dahbur was born. Here was the vegetable market, and further up the headquarters of the Communist Party, then Shujeirat Hill. This was the street of the great historian, Emil Toma. Muhammad Mi‘ari, former member of the Knesset and one of the founders of the ‘Progressive List for Peace’ in 1984, had lived near the corner over there. The poet Mahmoud Darwish had also lived here, as well as the lawyer and researcher Sabri Jiryis, originally from Fasuta in Upper Galilee.

  To the left was al-Wad Street, where the al-Ittihad newspaper had once had its press. It had become the entrance to a bakery. On the left was Qaysariya Street, formerly the house of Tawfiq Tuba, who spent ninety years, his whole life, in Haifa, and had never lived anywhere else.

  From al-Khury Street, we went up toward al-Hadar, Hadar HaCarmel, then al-Mahakim Street, and Hasan Shukri Street.

  “Ah, what a cuckold!” sighed Jamil, shaking his head like someone wary of revenge, before going on to explain: “Hasan Shukri, my friend” (he directed his words at me, as if the women would not be interested), “was head of the council for a time. In 1927, the first municipal elections, in the true sense of the word, were held. Various parties took part in them. People say that we disagree with each other these days, but we’ve had our differences since back then. We’ve never been united. The Jews supported the candidate Hasan Shukri, because he cooperated with them and sold them land, as well as acting as a broker here and there. Then he won the elections, and the Arabs started to chant the slogan ‘Hasan Bey, you cuckold, you sold the land for money!’”

  We went down a hill, as tragic as the way up had been. Most of the houses here were deserted. Beautiful houses, all built of Arab stone—not an Israeli stone used in their building. The houses were advertised as being for sale, and could be bought from the Israeli Amidar housing company. Why shouldn’t the Arabs buy them and return to them? Yes, indeed, why shouldn’t the Arabs buy them? I almost shouted this to myself, and the others must also have been saying it to themselves. When the car took us down toward Wadi Salib, the way the Israelis had intervened to change the landscape began to be visible. They didn’t hide what they had done. There was a slogan written on the wall of a house to the left, still clinging to the stones despite the fact that it had been written a long time ago. It acknowledged the crimes involved in driving the Arab residents out, and brazenly stated ‘Pesha’ meshtalim’—meaning ‘These crimes befit us’ or ‘represent a gain for us.’

  “Now I really have gone mad, Umm Jamil!” I told her. “It’s the madness of Haifa!”

  “A person living here in Haifa will stay sane, my boy,” she replied. “It’s the one who leaves his country and runs away that goes mad.”

  “Your words are golden!” said Jamil, praising what his mother had said—as indeed her words deserved. Then he leaned over me and said a few words in my ear, meant for me alone: “Thank the Lord, my mother’s hard disk isn’t faulty today.”

  Earlier, Jamil had warned me: “Later, you’ll be sitting with Mother on the veranda, and listening to her talking in a normal way about normal things. But if her hard disk stops working, she’ll start telling you about the jinni Marghodosh, who used to be her friend. She’ll say he comes at half-past nine. I tell her, ‘Mother, watch what you’re doing with Marghodosh, you might not be performing all your duties toward him.’ Every day, she gets up in the morning, turns on the tap, and talks to sprites, telling them, ‘My brothers, I won’t harm you, and don’t harm me!’”

  We both laughed. I told him that the deterioration of the hard disk containing the memories of old people was very widespread these days. I passed on the story of Zuhdiya, the wife of my late uncle, Muhammad. When I’d met her some years before, her three sons had drawn my attention to the fact that she had a fault in her hard disk. After she’d given me a hug to welcome me back to the country after a long absence, she had conveyed to me peace and greetings from my dead uncle, and I’d realized then that her mind really was affected.

  “Where’s my uncle, now, Auntie, what’s his news?” I’d asked her.

  “They say he’s in Egypt,” she’d replied, “and he’s married an Egyptian. But I don’t believe it. All his life, Muhammad’s always loved me. But I know he can marry; he’s a man and it’s his right. I basically don’t matter any more.”

  She’d paused for a moment, like someone who feels lost, before recovering a brief moment of consciousness and saying, “God have mercy on your uncle, he died a long time ago.”

  Then she’d stared at me and said, “You’re not Walid! Walid lives abroad in exile. He hasn’t come to Gaza for ages. What would bring him here?”

  “Okay, who am I, then, Auntie?” I’d asked her.

  She let out a shrill shriek of joy.

  “What’s this about, Auntie?” I’d asked her. “Who are you screeching for?”

  “Hasn’t Walid returned from exile?” she’d replied, and everyone in Abu Hatim’s house had laughed.

  When we got back to Jamil’s house, his mother began to tell her favorite story, which Jamil said she told only to favored guests. It was a true story, which no defect in the hard disk could confuse or influence the details of.

  “When I still lived in the house that the Jews took in ’48, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam used to pray among the people. It was he who taught the neighbors to pray, he taught us all. He would stand in front, and we would be behind. We, the women, were always at the back. He taught them to pray. I was in the Islamic school. I saw his daughter Maymana at school. I was five or six years old. Once she was wearing black. I asked her, ‘Maymana, why are you wearing black?’ She said to me, ‘Say: I wish the Jews were dead.’ So I repeated, ‘I wish the Jews were dead.’ ‘Say: I wish the British were dead.’ ‘I wish the British were dead,’ I replied. I repeated whatever she said. I was young. Whatever she said to me, I would say as well. Later, I asked her, ‘Why did you say, I wish the Jews and British were dead?’ She was a strong girl. ‘Because they killed my father,’ she told me, without a single tear falling from her eyes.”

  Umm Jamil fell silent and wiped the tears from her eyes with the edge of her white kerchief. Jamil continued with the story of Maymana—the daughter of Sheikh al-Qassam—as she grew older, and her name grew with her: ‘daughter of the Martyr al-Qassam.’ He told how, with extraordinary bravery, she had
stood up in the first Arab women’s conference to be held for Palestine in 1938. She was the women’s delegations’ spokeswoman. She praised her heroic father, and with her head raised to the heavens said, “Praise be to God, not once but twice, who has honored me with the martyrdom of my father, strengthened me through his death, and not shamed me through the humiliation of my homeland and the surrender of my nation.”

  Umm Jamil picked up the thread again:

  “It was dreadful, they killed him and took him away in a karra, a cart pulled by a donkey. They took him right away and buried him. They killed him, al-Qassam, in Haifa. I saw his body with my own eyes, laid out on the cart. The whole of Haifa got drunk then.”

  At the end of our evening—which lasted until just before midnight—Julie and I retired to the bedroom that our hosts had allocated us. Umm Jamil’s stories had helped keep us awake, and now I couldn’t sleep, for I remembered our appointment with Jinin in Jaffa. I took Jinin’s pages out of my little bag, sat down at a table in the room, and started to read a new chapter of Filastini Tays, to the whisper of the waves in the sea nearby. Julie, who was exhausted from our travels, was unable to stay awake and dozed off instantly.

  That morning in Gaza, Mahmoud Dahman rested his head on the edge of his mother’s grave, which he had found after a long absence. He stretched his legs out in front of him. He looked at the dewdrops gathering on the edge of the grave, and on the leaves of the fig tree his grandfather had planted long before Mahmoud’s father had planted him in his mother’s belly. He and his siblings had called their grandfather’s tree Mas‘ud. It had an enormous trunk, twisted like his grandfather’s emaciated body in his last days, when he was scarcely alive.

  After he had asked seven times for God’s mercy on him, and his sons and their mother had done the same, Mahmoud’s father had described his own father and enumerated his virtues, saying:

  “He prayed the dawn prayer under the fig tree so as to be close to heaven, only separated from it by the twigs and branches of a blessed tree mentioned in the Noble Quran. When he had finished his last prostration, and bowed down, and repeated his salaams—‘Peace be upon you and the mercy of God . . . Peace be upon you and the mercy of God’—he got up, with the remains of prayer in his mouth, and his lips drew near to the fruit on the tree. He ate like someone eating figs in heaven. He used to water his tree with olive oil and manure it with thyme. He would smell their scents in the green figs, whose color was bright as the summer dawn, and his chest would open wide as the gate of divine mercy. ‘Thyme is blessed, my children!’ he would say. And anyone who heard him would repeat after him, ‘Praise be to God, who has made for us in this world figs, and olives, and thyme.’ And I would add to the prayer: ‘And bread from the oven, father.’ And my father would laugh.”

  *

  Mahmoud wiped his face with his hands, steeped in dew and memories. He recited the Fatiha for his mother’s soul, his head still resting on the side of her grave. His lifelong dream had been to rest his head on her shoulder, strong as the concrete of her tomb, but he had been too afraid. He had loved her a lot, but had been scared of her, too. Safiya had been strong. She’d had black eyes, hawk-like and angry for no reason by day, while in the darkness of the night they’d been like owl’s eyes as they watched everyone sleeping. She’d had a Roman nose, like the noses of the ancient statues of that empire.

  In their youth, Mahmoud and his brother Awni were often rude about their mother in her absence. They often agreed that she wasn’t like other women, and wondered how she could have borne them. But they didn’t find it strange that their father, known as Sheikh Ibrahim, had been stubborn enough to marry her.

  “You do know, Mahmoud, that mother’s a man?” Awni would say to Mahmoud, with an inherited astonishment that, like the stubborn gene, distinguished the Dahmans and governed their emotions.

  Mahmoud would respond wickedly, “Of course, look how our father—tall and broad as he is—trembles when he stands and talks to her!”

  The young males of the family called her Hajja Safiya, despite the fact that she was not a hajja and died still hoping to perform the pilgrimage. When she heard herself called Hajja Safiya for the first time, she searched in every direction, looking for who it might be. And she was right to, for she had not yet reached the age when people look for some means of cleansing their consciences and ridding themselves of their sins. Most likely, everyone called her Hajja because she was the wife of Sheikh Ibrahim, and she had a pure heart, white as his was, clean as a piece of calico cloth, or so people thought. A clean conscience, purer than that of many who had performed their religious duties and had hurried to shake off the mountains of sins that had piled up in their lives like dust piling up on an old carpet.

  The Dahmans gave Safiya the title ‘Hajja’ without her having to shake any piled-up sins from her body. She clung to her hopes as the dew clings to the end of summer or to the fruits of the fig tree, and said, “God willing, He will grant us a pilgrimage, us and all Muslims.” And then one day she found herself bearing the honorary title of ‘Hajja’ without even having tried to visit Mecca.

  Hajja Safiya was not pleased by her elder son Awni’s marriage to Aisha al-Faq‘awi from Gaza, and only accepted it at the time under duress. She gathered together the fuel of her hatred for Aisha and lit a fire in the heart of her son.

  The day Hajja Safiya had been waiting for came two months after the birth of her grandson Saeed, Awni’s second son. For Saeed wasn’t happy, as his name implied he should be. He emerged from the womb to a rumor that had accompanied his mother’s pregnancy, and which became a fact talked about by everyone: “Saeed’s not his father’s son. Aisha’s had a secret lover.” The whole camp said it: “The boy’s definitely not a bit like his father.” Even people who’d never seen him said it. The view was that, after so many years of his wife not becoming pregnant, Awni was no longer able to father children to add to the son he’d already been blessed with. Within a couple of months, this opinion had become stronger than a fatwa from Sheikh Amin, the imam of the camp mosque. Hajja Safiya was delighted by the rumor, and confirmed it: “Aisha has never been faithful! From the day she married Awni, she’s never loved him, never been able to stand him.”

  So Awni divorced her, and Aisha left the marital home that had held them together for more than fifteen years, took the ‘rumor child’ with her, and disappeared.

  In Khan Younis, where Mahmoud Dahman went to repair the familial links that had been broken since the nakba, he found the old story of his brother Awni waiting for him.

  His brother Rajab, who was three years younger than him, told him that Awni had gone mad and divorced his wife, but after no more than a month he had regretted what he had done. Whenever he recalled Aisha’s name, he would beat his head with clenched fists and sometimes slap his cheeks with his hands like a woman who had lost a child. One dark morning, Awni got up early and went out, leaving his four-year-old son Fayiz asleep in his grandmother’s bed. He took a taxi to Gaza, and went straight away to the Shuja‘iyya quarter, where he made for the house of his father-in-law.

  To calm himself, he told himself that he was ready to grovel on his knees in front of his father-in-law to get back his divorced wife. He would ask his Lord for mercy, and say to Aisha, “I have brought you back to my authority as your husband.” And his father-in-law would say to him, “Take your wife, Awni, my son, and return home. May God guide you both.” Then he would take her hand, which would tremble with her desire. He would take their child, Saeed, in his arms—a child cleansed by his words, and by his rejection of divorce, from the rumor that had clung to him all his life. Then he would take them both back to Khan Younis.

  He passed the butcher’s shop belonging to Bashir al-Fahmawi (Abu Umar). He greeted him and asked him to lend him a knife, which he said was to slaughter a sacrificial sheep. Abu Umar lent him the knife, but when he reached his father-in-law’s house, Awni didn’t ask his wife to gather her clothes, pick up the child, and come back
to their house in Khan Younis. Instead, he stabbed her and killed the child in a way that even the police who arrived later had never come across before. The details of the crime were too horrific to be released. Awni was arrested, and a medical examination showed that he was insane, so a week later he was sent to the Khanka Psychiatric Hospital in Qalyubia in Egypt.

  That incident had remained a powerful marker in Mahmoud’s life. The tragedy of his nephew Fayiz never left him—a young boy who grew up with a dead mother, an insane father, and a brother killed by his father because of a rumor.

  The Remainer had never imagined that his brother Awni would be the first Palestinian to honor the psychiatric hospital in Qalyubia with his presence. Indeed, he would become something of an ambassador in the hospital, anticipating the appointment of the first Palestinian ambassador in Cairo by decades.

  At any rate, Awni wouldn’t be there to receive Mahmoud in Gaza, to rejoice at his return, embrace him, and cry on his shoulders as he used to when his father beat him as a miserable young boy.

  Mahmoud himself had sometimes had cause to beat his own son, Filastin, who had inherited his features, habits, and nature from him, as well as a lot of his stubbornness—indeed, he surpassed him in it.

  Filastin often told the story of a particular incident which reminded him of his superiority:

  One morning, I had an argument with Adil, our neighbors’ son, over who should captain the Taba team in the quarter, and we came to blows. Adil insulted me in a way that was a slur on my father. “Why should you be our captain, you son of a laundryman?” he asked me, looking at me in a provocative way before running off. My blood boiled, and I could feel it almost bursting my veins. I picked up some stones from the ground, threw them, and hit him on the forehead. He started bleeding at once, and I could see blood flowing from between his eyes as his screaming grew louder. I was afraid he’d collect the whole quarter together around me, Jews and Arabs alike, so I fled toward Lydda station and didn’t go back home until after sunset.